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This paper uses several decades of US time-diary surveys to assess the impact of low-skilled immigration, through lower prices for commercial child care, on parental time investments. Using an instrumental variables approach that accounts for the endogenous location of immigrants, we find that low-skilled immigration to the United States has contributed to substantial reductions in the time allocated to basic child care by college-educated mothers of non-school age children. However, these mothers have not reduced the time allocated to more stimulating educational and recreational activities with their children. Understanding the factors driving parental time investments on children is crucial from a child development perspective.

This paper demonstrates that immigration decisions respond to differences in local labor market conditions by documenting the change in low-skilled immigrant inflows in response to supply increases among the US-born. Using pre-reform welfare participation rates as an instrument for changes in native labor supply, I find that immigrants prefer cities with fewer welfare leavers over cities with larger reform-induced supply shifts. The extent of the selection is substantial: for each additional native woman working in a city as a result of welfare reform, 0.8 fewer female immigrants choose to live and work there. These results provide direct evidence that international migration flows tend to equilibrate returns across US local labor markets.

We use data from the 1989-2001 March Supplements to the Current Population Survey to determine whether welfare reform contributed to declines in health insurance coverage experienced by low-skilled women. Between 1988 and 2000, women with less than a high school education experienced an 8.0 percentage point decline in the probability of having health insurance. Against this backdrop of large declines, welfare waivers and TANF are associated with modest increases in coverage for low-skilled women of 2.3 and 3.6 percentage points respectively. Overall, our findings suggest that welfare reform did not contribute to declines in coverage but rather offset them somewhat.